CLINICAL RISK REDUCTION
Prescribing pitfalls
New GMC guidance targets some common pitfalls in primary care prescribing
Researchers found that as many as one in 20 prescriptions written by GPs contains an error. In England alone, with 900 million items prescribed each year, that amounts to 45 million errors. Although most of these errors were classed as mild or moderate, around one in every 550 prescription items was found to contain a serious error – equating to 1.6 million potentially dangerous prescriptions per year across England. Tese findings highlighted some areas of
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needed improvement and also set the scene for the publication in February 2013 of the GMC revised guidance – Good practice in prescribing and managing medicines and devices. Certain prescribing errors are obviously
more likely than others. In the GMC report the most common types of errors were incomplete information on the prescription, dose/strength errors, incorrect timing of
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REPORT published in 2012 by the GMC yielded some startling statistics in regard to primary care prescribing.
doses and failure to arrange appropriate monitoring of prescribed drugs. Te risk also increased according to the number of medicines a patient was taking (each additional medicine increased error risk by 16 per cent), patient age (children and over-75s were twice as likely to have an error) and the type of medicine prescribed. Another study published in 2007 found that just four classes of drug are associated with around half of preventable medication-related hospital admissions: antithrombotics (e.g. aspirin), anticoagulants (e.g. warfarin), NSAIDs and diuretics. Prescribing errors feature commonly in
MDDUS case files either as patient complaints or more serious legal claims of clinical negligence, or GMC actions against
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